ISSC: Interactive Semantic Shared Control for Haptic Teleoperation

We propose a novel interactive semantic shared control framework that exploits an active high-level communication loop between the human operator and the robot for time-efficient teleoperation. In shared control approaches, accurate prediction of the operator's intention is crucial to enable the robot to provide meaningful assistance. Incorrect intention prediction (e.g., target objects to be interacted with) increases the task duration due to conflicts between human behaviors and robot guidance. Unlike existing methods, our approach not only passively observes and predicts the human operator's input in the haptic control loop, but also actively communicates with the human operator in an additional semantic loop in the form of a speech user interface to optimize the effectiveness of assistance. We evaluate our ISSC framework for a pegin-hole teleoperation task. The experimental results show that the proposed framework significantly outperforms teleoperation without assistance and conventional shared control paradigms regarding task execution efficiency and user control quality, and reduces task completion time by up to 26.68% and 39.00%, respectively.